FORRESTER RESEARCH RECENTLY RELEASED a report outlining key areas of focus for CIOs in 2008.
The report, based on interviews with Forrester’s CIO clients, suggests that IT infrastructure and operations personnel work in 2008 to improve their business acumen to support CIOs in their efforts to implement virtualization technologies, to consolidate products, to simplify operations, and to boost business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities.
Simon Yates, vice-president and research director, said IT workers should develop cross-technology skills and become more business and application savvy as executives look to IT to boost their capabilities while cutting costs.
“We are always talking about CIOs needing to sharpen their technology IQ. It’s time for IT people to sharpen their business IQ,” remarked Yates.
Yates said data centre professionals can better serve CIOs in 2008 by evaluating virtualization tools, helping to sharpen IT best practices and helping to improve disaster recovery capabilities.
The Forrester study predicts that as companies roll out Microsoft’s Windows Vista software, they will also look to replace graying local area network architecture with 10-gigabit Ethernet and iSCSI technology in 2008.
Yates also noted that CIOs need IT personnel to learn to work with business users and in some cases with customers of their employers. IT professionals “are not the guys in the basement you don’t talk to anymore,” he noted.
